Fur animals, particularly mink, are to be supplied with fresh feed at regular intervals, preferably daily. With a large number of animals, and hence cages, on each farm this may be a highly time-consuming task. Therefore effort has been put into finding ways to automate the feeding of such animals.
WO2008/101500 describes an unmanned motorized feed cart, which by means of sensors is guided along a guide wire or other signal emitter which may be disposed at the floor along a row or between rows of fur animal cages. Communication equipment is provided on the feed cart adapted for communicating with RFID-tags on each animal or each cage.
A disadvantage related to this automated feed cart is that the use of RFID-tags for each cage or even each animal on a mink farm scale may both involve extra work with the RFID-tags and furthermore it may be an expensive solution.
Further, at fur animal farms the conditions may be very harsh to electronic devices, e.g. due to risk of soiled/contaminated surfaces and/or higher levels of certain damaging gasses in the surroundings. Consequently, the use of RFID-tags, cameras etc. as described in WO2008/101500 may be unreliable.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a simpler and more reliable feeding method to facilitate an improved feeding routine for feeding minks and other fur-bearing animals.